The Lost Prince (56 page)

“Nonetheless,” Eleanor said, “we will look at all of them.”

Jodl and Sonino no longer eyed each other, simply went about their duties with grim-faced determination. Any disappointment they both experienced in the biggest of hospitals, this one well within the boundaries of Italy, they kept to themselves.

“We are ready to move on to the next location,” Eleanor said.

The Italian nurses, of higher training perhaps than their counterparts
in the villages, had done their best to keep the rooms clean, but their task too was near impossible. In spite of the best intentions and the liberal use of disinfectant, the whole place smelled of feces, urine, and despair. They had become accustomed to the task but also to refraining from evaluating the situation at each departure. But Jodl could sense now, as they passed the last cot and stared into the last haggard face, that it was over. They had passed into the last row and looked into the eyes of the last patient. Eleanor looked at Jodl and sighed deeply. “He is not here,” she said with finality.

Lieutenant Sonino, following some distance behind them, always alert and looking fresh, shook his head. “I am sorry, Signora Burden,” he said in one of his only moments of humility.

“And this is your last suggestion?” she said.

“I am afraid so. The other hospitals are near Rome, very far to the south, and they have received no patients from the Caporetto debacle or directly after.” When to accept? When to object? There was, she knew, no science to it. Dr. Freud had advised looking for the unusual: “Do not forget the counterintuitive,” he had said. But this time the observation seemed undeniable. No wounded from Arnauld’s time had been shipped south to Rome. They were looking too far from the war zone where the explosion had happened.

Eleanor said nothing but turned with her head down and walked past Jodl without a word and out toward the entrance of the hospital. At the door, the nurse who had received them offered her consolation. “I am sorry, signora. We have many visitors who come looking and nearly always they leave without any news. I fear there have been many souls lost in this war.”

Eleanor reached out her hand and laid it on the nurse’s arm, as if she were the one bereaved. “I know,” she said softly. “I know that you have seen much misery.”

As they walked away and Jodl saw the look of resignation on Eleanor’s face, he approached her. “Might we have a word in private, Frau Burden?” he said.

At a good remove from the others, out of earshot, Jodl stopped, and she noticed immediately the severe look on his face, something she had not seen before from one with whom she had shared so much. “I have something to tell you,” he said solemnly.

“Please,” she said, unable to imagine that any words of consolation could help in this moment.

“I was not honest,” he began slowly. “I thought it would do no harm since the situation was dire anyway, but when I wrote my report, I did not tell all I knew. My apology now is abject.”

“Go on,” she said, suddenly looking puzzled.

“When I interviewed the witnesses of the carnage of Herr Esterhazy’s end there was not the agreement that I represented.”

“Go on,” she said cautiously.

“They all agreed that the shell had exploded nearly on top of the group of prisoners and Austrian officers, but their descriptions differed. One was certain that the decapitated man was Herr Esterhazy, but one said it was the young Czech officer, and the third said it was an Italian prisoner.” The words hung in the small space between them, and neither spoke. “There was not the decisiveness I reported.”

At first, Eleanor could not speak. “But why, Franz?” she said finally.

“I was bitter, Frau Burden. I had lost my sons. I wanted some kind of balance to things. So I made up the report and turned an ambiguity into a certainty.” He had his head down. “I am deeply sorry.”

Eleanor said nothing. She could not speak. The look she gave Herr Jodl was more questioning than angry, but then it softened and she looked into his downcast face. She reached out and touched his arm. “It is all right, Herr Jodl. I understand.” And still stony and now resolute, she turned and walked away toward where Lieutenant Sonino waited by the automobile.

She walked in silence, the two men following. She opened the door by herself, not waiting for the Italian lieutenant. She let herself in and sat in silence while the two men found their seats. When all four of them—Eleanor, Jodl, the Italian lieutenant, and the driver—were in their places, and before Lieutenant Sonino, who had turned in his seat, could ask his “Where to now, Signora Burden?” she looked up, as if passing from deep reflection into determination.

“I wish to return to Gorizia,” she said.

“We Have Come to the Last”

T
hey drove through the night, the passengers sleeping as they could. It was eight in the morning when they pulled up in front of the ancient palazzo where Eleanor and Jodl had been the morning that the bomb-disposal crew had made their miscalculation with the unexploded Austrian artillery shell. She stepped out of the car, and as usual Herr Jodl followed. “This is where he must be,” she said, expectation in her voice. “This is our last hope.” And her companion said nothing, only followed grim-faced, aware along with her that they had reached the end of the line.

As they walked in, the reception nurse on duty recognized them. “We have returned for a second look,” Eleanor said with a friendly assertion.

The nurse, who like her counterpart in Piave had seen many fruitless visits and had learned to withhold her opinion, said, “Of course,” and rose to usher them into the center of the hospital.

Lieutenant Sonino waited behind in the reception area as Eleanor and Jodl walked into the first large room of patients, the room where just days ago they had seen the man who had been torn apart by an artillery shell. They walked past the beds and remembered some of the most severely wounded from their first visit. But true to their original mission, Eleanor walked up to each former soldier and made the most intense of eye contact, and Jodl walked beside her, offering the taciturn support to which they both had become fully accustomed.

When they came to the large room that held the most desperate of the cases, she did not flinch or look away, and Jodl did not leave her side. Both of them were aware of how orderly the room was now after the mayhem of the morning of the bomb explosion. They approached each forlorn case, performed their function, and then walked on. When they finished with the last, Eleanor gave her companion a final resigned nod, and they turned to leave the room and perhaps the final group of disturbeds.

“He is not here,” she said with a finality that her partner had not heard before.

“I am sorry, Frau Burden,” Jodl said.

They had visited scores of hospitals, it seemed, looked into hundreds, maybe thousands, of faces. Now there was a finality to their return to Gorizia, a sad culmination. With her eyes alone, Eleanor said to Herr Jodl, “This is the end. We have come to the last.” For perhaps the first time in their long journey, there was bitter resignation in her voice. “It is over.”

As they approached the door of the large room, a young woman in a novitiate’s habit, who had seemed to appear from nowhere, called out to them. “Signora, signor, wait please.”

They turned and found her pointing into the center of the grim space they had just left. At the far end of the room, standing in a corner they had just recently walked past, stood one neglected patient, gaunt and harrow-eyed, one without a trace of physical injury, now raising his hand toward them. A loud moan came from his twisted lips and filled the room. He was staring after them, his arm raised, as if he had seen a vision.

“He is one who hides, signora,” the novitiate said, her voice almost in panic. “He does not wish to be seen.”

Eleanor took a few tentative steps toward the pointing man. He appeared a ghostly figure, a man older than the others, with matted hair, deep-set and hollow eyes, a haggard face. He opened his mouth to speak, but only a deep mournful and guttural moan escaped, and the hollow eyes stared at her. She came across the room to him, and for a long moment the two just stared at each other.

He spoke the words now with unmistakable clarity: “Bay-ah-tree-chay.” The beloved Beatrice.

“It is what the Italian boys say,” the novitiate said. “There are many reports of this.”

Eleanor Burden stared into the ghostlike face for a long moment, then turned suddenly to the retired Viennese policeman who had moved up to her side. Eleanor released a sigh from the depth of her being. She spoke in a barely audible whisper. “Our search is over,” she said. “This is Arnauld Esterhazy.”

REBORN

F
rom there the task was simple, a plan worked out well in advance. “Now we must get Arnauld to Dr. Jung without mishap,” Eleanor said. They would take him by train back through Trieste to Vienna. In fresh clothes, cleaned up, shaven, well shorn, except for the haunted vacant stare, their newly resurrected companion looked almost normal and would attract no unusual attention. And they had the official papers provided by Lieutenant Sonino, although Italian, establishing him as an Austrian citizen.

“Is there anything else I can do for you?” the young lieutenant asked Eleanor, as he helped her out of the automobile at the hotel near the train station in Trieste.

“There is one more favor, actually,” Eleanor said, and she handed him an envelope she had prepared. “This is the name of a prisoner I very much wish to find. Among so many defeated Austrian prisoners of war.”

The young lieutenant frowned involuntarily and then looked down at the envelope and accepted it as he knew was his obligation. “If you wish it,” he said, “it is my command. It will be my personal project,” and then he added, “among the many Austrians.”

“You are kind to do it,” Eleanor said, as Herr Jodl came around from the other side of the automobile. “Lieutenant Sonino has asked if there is any more he can do for us,” she said to her companion.

“With these papers and forceful explanation,” Jodl said, patting the briefcase, “we ought to make it through.” “Forceful explanation,” of
course, meant Jodl’s strong presence and the use of American dollars. Without speaking, Franz Jodl would eye their silent companion from time to time, wondering if they had indeed found the right man or if intense expectation had shaped the hapless soul now in their custody into what his determined companion from Boston desperately wanted to find. “You are absolutely certain, Frau Burden?” Jodl had asked more than once shortly after the moment of discovery, and she answered that she was.

“Absolutely,” she had said each time with her ferocious conviction. “This is Arnauld Esterhazy.”

“Is there perhaps some identifying characteristic?” the former policeman said.

“There is,” Eleanor answered, but offered no more.

But still, silently and involuntarily, Franz Jodl could not help his scrutiny of their mysterious travel partner from time to time, and his wondering.

Lieutenant Sonino and their driver had agreed to leave them at a hotel near the train station in Trieste, where they would stay for the night and be traveling in the morning. “I have completed my assignment then,” the young Italian said in parting from them.

“And well,” Jodl said.

“I have given you a way to reach me,” he said, “should you be needing more.” He handed Eleanor a folded sheet of pale blue stationery. Eleanor was silently grateful for her connection to the house of Morgan.

“You have been kind,” Eleanor said. “Herr Jodl and I can manage from here.”

And when they had found the hotel room, Jodl had gone out to find new clothes, giving Eleanor some time alone with their new companion. She insisted on giving him a bath.

Alone with this man she had missed so powerfully—yearned for even—over four years, she undressed him slowly. He did not resist, nor did he cooperate any more than moving as she suggested with gestures. Once naked, he stepped into the warm bath and sat, as if recognizing the familiar action.

She was reminded of the story that circulated in Vienna in the aftermath of the tragedy of Mayerling. The empress, fully devastated by the apparent death of her son, would not accept the reports, it was rumored, until she was able to be alone with the body and to see for herself the
birthmark she knew her son bore, one identical to that of his father, the emperor. And so, Eleanor thought, she would not be able to accept the identity of this man until a moment like this, alone.

Having seen the birthmark for herself, knowing now for certain that this man was Arnauld Esterhazy, she began slowly sponging his nakedness with loving attention and found herself curious and aroused and touched, more deeply than she could express. Unlike his soul and mind, his gaunt body, beautifully untouched by the horror he had experienced, bore no traces of war, his flesh, smooth and unblemished, carrying no trace of the violence and flying metal that had surrounded him all those months, tearing apart the lives of so many in his presence.

He submitted to the attention of her gentle sponging with a neutral gaze, resisting none of her stroking, but showing no sign of resistance or pleasure, except a small smile from time to time as the warm water flowed over his torso and limbs. He made no sound as she talked to him soothingly. “It is all right, Arnauld. Everything is going to be all right.”

Jodl had left her alone with this man they had rescued from obscurity, as she had asked, and it would have been easy now to lead him to the bed in the adjoining room and to lie with him in her arms, a memory that had been with her for the past four years. But with each stroke of the large sponge, she calmed any yearning and inched toward that sacred distance she would keep from this moment on, that her friend Jung had advised her to maintain. “It will be different now,” Jung had said, “if you find him. There will be a line you must never cross. He will need you as his untouchable inspiration, his Beatrice.”

She caressed his nakedness now, as a mother and a lover, dissolving with each intimate stroke any doubts in her own mind. She took her time in the ceremonial process, practicing what she knew must be her new role, watching over her charge but with the detachment of a temple priestess. So much seemed to come together for her in that moment, so much memory, so much longing, so much fulfillment. She was back in Vienna with the great love of her life, each stroke of the sponge carrying with it the memory of fulfillment and connection, the memory of complete physical gratification that had come to her then in Vienna and had been rekindled briefly and poignantly that night four years ago on Acorn Street. Quietly and calmly, without emotion, this man seemed willing to represent the other, this moment encompassing all other moments of deep love and
connection in her life. The moment was sublime and timeless, and Eleanor gave in to it completely.